“OH, OH…IT’S THE JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY!”

This whole right-wing, “small-government” meme has been going on for a very long time — and the argument from the right never changes:  Government is bad, and we have to protect ourselves from government.  Everything else flows from this paranoid delusion.

Historically, Conservatives have railed against all kinds of government legislation.  They’ve objected to laws requiring bikers to wear helmets, mandating seat belts in cars, and establishing reasonable speed limits.  You see, any government requirement is an infringement on freedom.  You know — the freedom to have traumatic head injuries from not wearing biking helmets, or the freedom to risk the lives of our children in car accidents without seat-belt or car-seat requirements.   

In the 50’s and 60’s Conservatives were screaming about the “big-government plot to put fluoride in our drinking water.”  Ooooo, the government is forcing us to have fewer cavities!   At some point we really do need to grow-up and realize that government in our democracy is not them, it is us.  We are not out to get us.  Government is not bad;  it is inefficient at times, and sometimes bureaucratic — but not evil. 

This paranoia and suspicion from the right breeds anger, and the Conservative movement is dangerously close to being branded as a movement bordering on violence.  Political talk about seceding from the country, armed resistance, revolution, alongside demonization of the President as a danger to America — is playing with fire and should be seen as such.

It is no surprise that the Republican Party has just been outed with their Power Point plan to aggressively use F E A R to motivate donors and raise money for the November elections.  They’ve been doing that for years.  Remember when Dick Cheney told us that if we voted for John Kerry we would be attacked by terrorists?  Otherwise known as the “Vote for Democrats and you will die” Republican slogan.

One of the most extreme right-wing organizations, the John Birch Society (JBS), has been around for over 50 years, and has quite a history.  It was founded by Robert Welch, Jr. in Indianapolis in 1958.  Historically, the John Birch Society opposed:  the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s by saying that the movement was full of communists;  and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by asserting that this law overstepped the rights of each state to enact their own Civil Rights laws.  

Yeah, that would’ve worked out well:  segregation in some states and integration in others.  Hey, that sounds familiar — didn’t our country fight a Civil War over that notion?

The John Birch Society is also anti-immigration and against the United Nations.  In the early years they called President Eisenhower a “conscious, dedicated agent of the communist conspiracy” and said that the U.S. government was “under operational control of the Communist Party.”  JBS asserted that there were Communists throughout our government (in addition to President Eisenhower). They even opposed President Eisenhower’s meetings with the Soviet Union as showing weakness — at least the right is always consistent in their view that the USA doesn’t negotiate, we go to war!

The John Birch Society has been a joke for decades.  Just six years after JBS was founded in 1958 the Chad Mitchell Trio wrote and performed this song to millions of laughing Americans.  We need to see the John Birch Society for what it is:  an old, last century, still paranoid, and in a really pathetic sort of way, still kinda funny!

In the early 60’s the founder/editor of the right-wing magazine National Review, William F. Buckley, dismissed the John Birch Society from the Conservative movement declaring that JBS was “idiotic and paranoid” and by stating that the paranoid ranting from the John Birch Society had no place in the conservative movement, or the Republican Party. 

And yet the John Birch Society is welcomed back into the fold now, as a 2010 co-sponsor of the Conservative movement’s annual conference —  CPAC in Washington, D.C.  The Conservative movement, and much of the Republican Party itself, has gone so far to the right that they more closely resemble the haters in the Tea Party and the John Birch Society than their own heroes like William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan.

With this new embrace of the John Birch Society, clarity is really achieved on where the political right stands today:   Conservatives have moved so far right that they no longer hold any solutions for our nation.  Maybe the answers are on the left, or in the center — but we know the answers are not with this Conservative/Republican movement of fear and anger.